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ACC AM 28/12/18
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(ACC Mentioned) Plastic Bottle Recycling Dips Amid Industry ‘Transformation’
Dec 27, 2018 | Houston Chronicle
By Marissa Luck
Images of straws stuck in sea turtles and floating garbage islands have put plastic waste in the spotlight. But even as consumers express outrage, plastic bottle recycling fell last year, according to a new industry study. -
(ACC Mentioned) Reporter’s Notebook: ‘Gold Collar’ Workers Growing More Vital in Oil & Gas Industry
Dec 28, 2018 | Houston Chronicle
By Marissa Luck
My first visit to a Texas petrochemical plant felt like stepping into a little country - it has its own strict security borders (photo identification required); its own national dress (blue flame-retardant coveralls and hard hats); and even its own language (with words like ethylene oligomerization and polyalphaolefins) -
EPA Furloughs if No Deal This Week: Wheeler (1)
Dec 27, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Dean Scott
EPA employees will be furloughed beginning Saturday if Congress and President Donald Trump can’t reach a deal by then to extend funding for about one-quarter of the government. -
(ACC Mentioned) 2019 Outlook: Companies Latching Onto Nonstick Chemical Alternatives
Dec 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sylvia Carignan and David Schultz
Manufacturers of hundreds of products—from microwave popcorn to plastic cups to firefighting foam—will continue to seek alternatives to products containing chemical compounds that have contaminated water supplies around the country. -
What Foods Are Banned in Europe but Not Banned in the U.S.?
Dec 28, 2018 | The New York Times
By Roni Caryn Rabin
Q. What foods are banned in Europe that are not banned in the United States, and what are the implications of eating those foods? -
When Hospitals Pour Drugs Down the Drain
Dec 28, 2018 | CNN
By Susan Scutti
Patricia Deesy, a registered nurse, is worried about the drinking water in her home state of North Carolina. -
US Fossil Fuel Exports Spur Growth, Climate Worries
Dec 28, 2018 | AP (In The New York Times, The Washington Post)
By Michael Biesecker
In South Korea's largest shipyard, thousands of workers in yellow hard hats move ceaselessly between towering cranes lifting hulks of steel. -
Kinder Morgan Gas Pipeline Survives Legal Scrutiny (1)
Dec 27, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jenniffer Bennett and David Schultz
A Kinder Morgan Inc. gas pipeline in northeastern Pennsylvania appears to be free of legal jeopardy after an environmental group lost its bid in court to block it. -
Report: US Miscalculated Benefit of Better Train Brakes
Dec 27, 2018 | AP (In Transport Topics Online)
By Matthew Brown
President Donald Trump’s administration miscalculated the potential benefits of putting better brakes on trains that haul explosive fuels when it scrapped an Obama-era rule over cost concerns, The Associated Press has found. -
Metro-North Initiates Safety Enhancement System on Mid-Hudson Line
Dec 28, 2018 | River Journal
By Alain Begun
Metro-North Railroad has begun commissioning a new safety system, Positive Train Control (PTC) on the segment of the Hudson Line between Tarrytown and Croton-Harmon. -
‘Green New Deal’ Divides Democrats Intent on Addressing Climate Change
Dec 27, 2018 | The Washington Post
By Elise Viebeck and David Weigel
One week after House Democrats triumphed in the election, Rep. Nancy Pelosi extended her hand to the party’s energized left wing by promising to revive the select committee on climate change.
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(ACC Mentioned) Plastic Bottle Recycling Dips Amid Industry ‘Transformation’
Dec 27, 2018 | Houston Chronicle
By Marissa Luck
Images of straws stuck in sea turtles and floating garbage islands have put plastic waste in the spotlight. But even as consumers express outrage, plastic bottle recycling fell last year, according to a new industry study.
A joint report by the trade groups American Chemistry Council and Association of Plastic Recyclers estimated that plastic bottle recycling decreased 3.6 percent last year, dipping to 2.8 billion pounds in 2017. The decrease is partially due to containers becoming lighter weight, but also because the rate of bottle recycling hasn’t grown significantly in recent years.
In “an exceedingly difficult year for plastic bottle recycling,” the report said, about 29.3 percent of plastic bottles were recycled in 2017, down about a half percentage point from a year earlier. Over the past five years, the rate of plastic bottle recycling has remained essentially flat.
“Americans are continuing to recycle and recycling behavior continues to grow, however there is also more material continuing to go into waste stream and plastics are growing,” said Steve Russell, vice president of the plastics division of American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical and plastic makers.
RELATED: As plastic waste chokes the planet, can petrochemical industry respond?
The American Chemistry Council’s members account for 80 percent of all plastic resin produced in the United States — the tiny plastic pellets that go into a host of consumer goods and are made by companies such as Houston’s LyondellBasell and Chevron Phillips Chemical.
The explosion in plastic waste and the increasing focus on it by environmentalists, regulators and policy makers is posing a threat to chemical companies and an energy industry that often points to plastics — and the petrochemicals behind them — as key to supporting future demand for oil in the face of flattening demand for gasoline. Houston is one the biggest petrochemical hubs in the country, accounting for about 42 percent of the nation's petrochemical manufacturing capacity, according to the Greater Partnership of Houston.
Increasingly, the petrochemical industry sees recycling as a major part of the solution to mounting plastic waste and the damage it could do its business if governments respond by imposing restrictions on plastics or consumers seek alternatives to plastics. Local petrochemical makers have invested heavily into the recycling industry.
In March, LyondellBasell and the French waste management firm Suez launched a joint venture recycling company in the Netherlands. In November, The Woodlands’ Americas Styrenics announced a joint venture with Oregon-based Agilyx to run a recycling facility in Portland-area suburb.
Expect to see petrochemical companies continuing to grow their investment in recycling. Along with its Canadian counterpart, the American Chemistry Council and its members have pledged to recycle or recover all plastic packaging by 2040. Consumer products companies such as Coca Cola, Unilever, Pepsi and Proctor and Gamble have all pledged to significantly boost their use of recycled plastic in the coming decades, indicating demand for recycled material will rise, Russell said.
“What’s really happening is that there is going to be a fundamental transformation of the plastics business in the coming two dozen or so years where a significant amount of plastics is going to be sourced from waste,” Russell said.
At the same time, the plastic recycling industry is facing headwinds. The United States, for example, traditionally has exported much of its plastic waste to other countries, particularly China. Exports of post-consumer plastic bottle waste fell in 2017 and that drop is likely to continue due to China’s ban on several types of plastic waste imports that went into effect earlier this year.
Rachel Meidl, fellow in energy and environment at the Baker Institute at Rice University, wrote China’s refusal to import plastic waste will “upend recycling economics, disrupt the global supply chain and further exacerbate the need to globally manage plastics.”
The Chinese ban will force governments, businesses and individuals to find new solutions to the plastic waste problem, Meidl said. And while recycling will be a big piece of that, there likely is “no single, one-size-fits-all solution to the plastics issue," Meidl said.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Plastic-bottle-recycling-dips-amid-industry-13494463.php
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(ACC Mentioned) Reporter’s Notebook: ‘Gold Collar’ Workers Growing More Vital in Oil & Gas Industry
Dec 28, 2018 | Houston Chronicle
By Marissa Luck
My first visit to a Texas petrochemical plant felt like stepping into a little country - it has its own strict security borders (photo identification required); its own national dress (blue flame-retardant coveralls and hard hats); and even its own language (with words like ethylene oligomerization and polyalphaolefins)
Men pedal around tanks and machines on bicycles, following the country’s rules of the road by stopping for the occasional railroad car and white pick-up truck. Clusters of workers tinker with machines towering sometimes 15 or more stories above them like a downtown district. Inside one plant office, an oversized map with intricate red and blue lines outline the factory’s geography like an urban streetscape.
To my foreign eye, the Chevron Phillips Chemical’s Baytown plant looks like a sprawling maze of pipes, tubes and tanks. But what you can’t see at first glance is the dozens of people sitting several yards away who keep the plant’s machinery humming along safely.Unlimited Digital Access as little as $0.99Read more articles like this by subscribing to the Houston Chronicle SUBSCRIBE
They’re in an air-conditioned “blast-proof” control room behind a wall of computer monitors with moving diagrams and colored lines flashing in front of them like an automated game of Tetris. Called process operators, they sit in office chairs for 12-hour shifts tracking the computerized operations of each machine, pipe, tower and tank. They look for any sign of irregularity in temperature, pressure, timing and other minute changes.
Second thoughts?
They each hold two-year technical degrees - most likely with a fraction of the college debt as the average early career journalist, but with more than double the starting salary. The average plant operator with a two-year degree starts out with $80,000 salary and usually grows to $100,000 or above, according to the American Chemistry Council, the industry trade group.
Around the industry, they call them “gold-collar workers” a Chevron Phillips employee murmured to me. It’s not a common term, but one that is sometimes used to describe jobs that don’t fall neatly into the “blue collar” or “white collar” categories. Gold collar workers need the mind of a white-collar worker but the hands of a blue-collar one, Harvard Business Review noted.
Think of the maintenance technician who repairs aircraft systems at Southwest Airlines; the manufacturing technician at Intel; the medical technologist who operates laboratory equipment and analyzes test results at Memorial Hermann Cancer Center.
“You can’t just be a great craftsman,” said Peter Rodriguez, economist and dean at Rice University. “You have to understand enough not just to operate the system, but to be creative and solve a problem that’s non-routine.”
Rodriguez estimates these highly-paid hourly technical workers make up about 10 percent or less of the workforce in the oil & gas industry, but he expects those numbers to grow, especially in offshore drilling, as fewer people head the rig itself and more work in control rooms monitoring systems.
These workers fall into what some economists call the “middle-skills gap” - the mounting gap in the supply and demand for skilled workers such as welders, truckers, pipefitters, millwrights, technicians and electricians. In the Houston area, the industrial construction sector alone could have a shortage of between 5,000 to 10,000 “middle-skill” workers in the next four years, because not enough people are entering these positions to keep up with the workers retiring, according to data from the Greater Houston Partnership, a business-finance economic development group.
Many young people don’t think of these gold collar professions when considering their options, notes Bill Gilmer, economist with University of Houston.
Squeaky clean
“Aspirations have been set at a different level these days in terms of what you should do coming out of high school, which isn’t necessarily bad,” Gilmer said. “But they don’t explain that alternative of a gold collar job or even high-paid construction job.”
Manufacturing companies want young people to know that gone are the days when working in a plant meant toiling over greasy machine, said Heather Betancourth, community relations representative for Chevron Phillips Chemical. “We’re a lot more technologically advanced than people give us credit for,” she said.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Reporter-s-Notebook-Gold-collar-workers-13494455.php
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EPA Furloughs if No Deal This Week: Wheeler (1)
Dec 27, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Dean Scott
EPA employees will be furloughed beginning Saturday if Congress and President Donald Trump can’t reach a deal by then to extend funding for about one-quarter of the government.
The Environmental Protection Agency has enough funding to continue running only through the end of this week, EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler wrote in a Dec. 27 email sent to agency employees, and obtained by Bloomberg Environment.
“However, in the event an appropriation is not passed by midnight Friday, December 28th, EPA will initiate orderly shutdown procedures,” Wheeler wrote. “Should a shutdown occur, employees will be placed on furlough.”
The administrator didn’t provide any figures on the number of workers to be furloughed. But the agency’s Dec. 17 contingency plan said of its 13,972 permanent and temporary workers, 753 would still be needed to stay on to protect life and property, while another seven Senate-confirmed presidential appointees would be kept to perform activities expressly authorized by law.Interior Furloughs
The EPA has technically remained open this week, but Dec. 27 is the second day that agency and many other federal employees returned to work after the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day holidays.
EPA employees would be joining those at the Interior Department, whose plans called for mass furloughs. The Bureau of Land Management’s latest contingency plan said 6,930 of the agency’s 9,260 employees would be sent home in a shutdown, while the Fish and Wildlife Service said in its plan that about 7,000 of its 8,359 employees also would be barred from coming to work. And the U.S. Geological Survey said in a study that a shutdown would affect more than 99 percent of its 8,000-member workforce.
The EPA already this week stopped updating web sites and social media accounts and cut back slightly on staffing. But those relatively modest steps can go only so far in conserving cash nearly a week after Congress and President Donald Trump couldn’t find a deal to extend government funding past Dec. 21 for EPA and the Interior Department but also other departments including homeland security and commerce.Hitting the Wall
The partial government shutdown is now in its sixth day with few signs of a compromise between Trump, who has insisted that any funding extension include $5 billion for a border wall, and congressional Democrats, who firmly oppose that spending.
Many lawmakers are bracing for the possibility the shutdown could drag on until at least Jan. 3, when Democrats take control of the House.
Some lawmakers have begun to call on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be able to write and renew flood insurance policies during the partial shutdown.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said in separate statements that the administration should reconsider its guidance preventing FEMA from issuing policies.
“I strongly disagree with this guidance, as it incorrectly interprets congressional intent demonstrated last week with Congress passing legislation to keep the program operating until June 2019,” Rubio said in a Dec. 27 statement.Service Shutdowns
The shutdown has already begun affecting EPA and Interior operations, including halting website updates and social media accounts, which makes it difficult for visitors to determine which national parks are open. Staff has been severely curtailed at National Parks and wildlife refuges.
While most BLM lands “remain accessible to visitors,” continued public access “may change without notice,” BLM warned. One drawback for visitors: There may be no bureau visitor services “including restrooms, trash collection, facilities or road maintenance.”
Similar warnings have gone up on other Interior Department agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which began closing public access to wildlife refuges Dec. 21. The service also stopped updating its @USFWSRefuges Twitter account.
Several BLM websites also are no longer being updated, including one that tracks developments for project environmental permitting.
The Interior Department’s Office of the Secretary cautioned its bureaus against posting any updates during the shutdown “unless the post relates to an exception for operations,” meaning responses to public safety threats or protection of property.
Employees also have been warned against posting information on their own time. “Working when not authorized, during a shutdown, would be a violation of the Antideficiency Act,” Interior’s contingency plan said. “Don’t do that.”
The chemicals industry is among those eager to see the shutdown end for the EPA. Attorneys specializing in chemicals policy have warned that a shutdown could have particularly severe effects on the EPA’s oversight of chemicals in commerce and further delay the entry of new chemicals onto the market.
(Updates with Wheeler announcing furloughs after Dec. 28 if no deal.)
https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/epa-furloughs-if-no-deal-this-week-wheeler-1
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(ACC Mentioned) 2019 Outlook: Companies Latching Onto Nonstick Chemical Alternatives
Dec 28, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sylvia Carignan and David Schultz
Manufacturers of hundreds of products—from microwave popcorn to plastic cups to firefighting foam—will continue to seek alternatives to products containing chemical compounds that have contaminated water supplies around the country.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been used to manufacture nonstick and stain-resistant coatings in clothing, fast-food wrappers, carpets, and other consumer and industrial products. The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to release a plan to address the contaminants in 2019, but with a lack of enforceable regulations and the possibility of lawsuits, companies will take the initiative to find their own solutions, sources told Bloomberg Environment.
The conversation about how to avoid using PFAS in consumer goods, and avoid substitutes that are persistent in the environment, will be a “big topic” in 2019, Shari Franjevic, program manager at Clean Production Action in Seattle, told Bloomberg Environment in an email.
Companies are investigating whether nonfluorinated alternatives perform as well as the compounds they’re replacing, and whether the alternatives can be recycled or composted, Jessica Bowman, senior director of global fluoro-chemistry for the American Chemistry Council, told Bloomberg Environment.
“I’m sure there will be a lot of activity related to this chemistry,” she said.
Companies around the world are opting to use clay, wax, latex, and other coatings as substitutes for PFAS in single-use food and drink containers, according to Clean Production Action, which develops tools for screening chemicals. Dart Container Corp.—which manufactures single-use, plastic Solo cups—is using a plant-based lining in some of its cup products.
“I would anticipate that manufacturers will be increasing their offerings of PFAS-free alternatives, and a growing number of purchasers, from large scale such as government organizations and retailers to small scale such as individuals, will seek PFAS-free and safer alternatives,” Franjevic said.Regulators Closing In
States, especially those on the East Coast, are seeking progressively stricter limits on PFAS compounds in drinking water, while some West Coast states work to limit the public’s exposure through food packaging. A ban on PFAS in paper food packaging will take effect in Washington state in 2022. The state’s Department of Ecology is first seeking alternatives, which it will report to the state legislature in 2019.
PFAS compounds may cause adverse health effects, including developmental effects to fetuses, testicular and kidney cancer, liver tissue damage, immune system or thyroid effects, and changes in cholesterol, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. No consensus exists on what amounts of the compounds are safe to consume.
The EPA’s health guidelines address two PFAS compounds: perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). The guidelines don’t mandate cleanup action, but some water utilities around the country have used those guidelines to gauge the safety of their drinking water.
In 2019, the EPA plans to determine whether it should set an enforceable level for PFOA and PFOS in drinking water. The agency will also consider designating PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances, which would give the EPA the ability to order cleanups and recover those costs at contaminated sites, according to Peter Grevatt, chair of the EPA’s cross-agency PFAS efforts who is retiring this year. Bio-Based Alternatives
Coop Danmark A/S, a consumer goods retailer in Denmark, stopped selling microwave popcorn in 2014 while it searched for a PFAS-free alternative.
Microwaveable popcorn bags—which have a waxy inner coating—may contain dozens of PFAS compounds, according to a 2017 study published in Food Chemistry. In terms of food packaging, those bags present a challenge for companies seeking to replace PFAS with other substances because they must hold up under intense heat, steam, and oils, according to Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director for the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington.
“We decided to remove the popcorn from our shelves because there was new scientific research showing the risk for abortion was very high if you have high levels of PFAS in your blood,” Malene Teller Blume, quality manager for Coop Danmark AS, told Bloomberg Environment.
The company now uses wood fibers to form a cellulose coating inside the bags, and uses third-party certification to ensure its suppliers’ raw materials don’t contain PFAS above a certain concentration.
At the same time, the company is hoping the Danish government will pass legislation that would formalize such a limit.
“It’s still a hard job to maintain our requirements,” she said.Keeping It in the Family
For some uses, companies are opting for other compounds within the PFAS family.
Some companies are moving away from those compounds toward a category of PFAS known as “short-chain” compounds because they have fewer carbon atoms.
Some short-chain PFAS compounds are less likely to persist and accumulate in organisms—including humans—as compared to long-chain PFAS compounds, such as PFOS and PFOA, according to the Interstate Technology & Regulatory Council. The council is a public-private coalition working to reduce barriers to the use of innovative air, water, waste, and remediation environmental technologies and processes, according to its website.
But, it’s not clear whether the short-chain compounds accumulate in the food chain, according to a study published February 2018 in Environmental Sciences Europe.
The EPA is gauging the human health hazards of two short-chain compounds, GenX and perfluorobutane sulfonic acid (PFBS). The agency will take public comments on its draft assessments on the compounds until January 2019.
Short-chain compounds are “already widely distributed in the environment,” the study stated. When manufacturing some products, such as wax and polish, greater quantities of short-chain compounds may be needed to replace long-chain compounds, according to the study.
Much of the concern about PFAS has focused on human exposure through drinking water, but scientists also are becoming more aware of inhalation. Some short-chain PFAS are more volatile, increasing the likelihood that they are being inhaled, Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said in a webinar held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science Nov. 27.
Manufacturers believe by moving to short-chain PFAS, they are reducing the potential risk for humans, Birnbaum said, but the effect of short-chain compounds on the environment is still an open question.Firefighting Foam
Makers of consumer goods aren’t the only ones struggling to move away from PFAS chemicals. The military is also having a tough time finding fire suppressants without fluorinated compounds that can meet its high performance standards.
Richard Mach, head of the Navy’s office for environmental compliance and restoration policy, said his team has yet to find a firefighting foam without PFAS that can extinguish a blaze in less than a minute. The Navy needs foams that act this fast because its aircraft carriers often contain large amounts of both fuel and ordnance, he told Bloomberg Environment.
“You hear vendors trying to sell their fluorine-free products saying, ‘It’s almost as good. It’s almost there,’” Mach said. But PFAS is “really, really effective. That’s what makes it so challenging.”
—With assistance from Pat Rizzuto.
https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/2019-outlook-companies-latching-onto-nonstick-chemical-alternatives
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What Foods Are Banned in Europe but Not Banned in the U.S.?
Dec 28, 2018 | The New York Times
By Roni Caryn Rabin
Q. What foods are banned in Europe that are not banned in the United States, and what are the implications of eating those foods?
A. The European Union prohibits or severely restricts many food additives that have been linked to cancer that are still used in American-made bread, cookies, soft drinks and other processed foods. Europe also bars the use of several drugs that are used in farm animals in the United States, and many European countries limit the cultivation and import of genetically modified foods.
“In some cases, food-processing companies will reformulate a food product for sale in Europe” but continue to sell the product with the additives in the United States, said Lisa Y. Lefferts, senior scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food safety advocacy organization.
A 1958 amendment to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act prohibits the Food and Drug Administration from approving food additives that are linked to cancer, but an agency spokeswoman said that many substances that were in use before passage of the amendment, known as the Delaney amendment, are considered to have had prior approval and “therefore are not regulated as food additives.”
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In October, the F.D.A. agreed to ban six artificial flavoring substancesshown to cause cancer in animals, following petitions and a lawsuit filed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and other organizations. The F.D.A. insists the six artificial flavors “do not pose a risk to public health,” but concedes that the law requires it not approve the food additives. Food companies will have at least two years to remove them from their products.
Here’s a short list of some of the food additives restricted by the European Union but allowed in American foods. Most must be listed as ingredients on the labels, though information about drugs used to increase the yield in farm animals is generally not provided.Potassium bromate and azodicarbonamide (ADA)
These additives are commonly added to baked goods, but neither is required, and both are banned in Europe because they may cause cancer. In recent years, some American restaurant chains have responded to consumer pressure and removed them from their food.
Potassium bromide is often added to flour used in bread, rolls, cookies, buns, pastry dough, pizza dough and other items to make the dough rise higher and give it a white glow. The International Agency for Research on Cancer considers it a possible human carcinogen, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the F.D.A. to ban it nearly 20 years ago. The F.D.A. says potassium bromate has been in use since before the Delaney amendment on carcinogenic food additives was passed.
Azodicarbonamide, or ADA, which is used as a whitening agent in cereal flour and as a dough conditioner, breaks down during baking into chemicals that cause cancer in lab animals. It is used by many chain restaurants that serve sandwiches and buns. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has urged the F.D.A. to bar its use. The F.D.A. says it is safe in limited amounts.Editors’ PicksThey Survived a Massacre. Then the Lawyers Started Calling.3 Far-Flung Cities Offer Clues to Unsnarling Manhattan’s StreetsIn Russian Village Swallowed by Sand, Life’s a Beach. Just Not in a Good Way.
ADVERTISEMENTBHA and BHT
The flavor enhancers and preservatives BHA and BHT are subject to severe restrictions in Europe but are widely used in American food products. While evidence on BHT is mixed, BHA is listed in a United States government report on carcinogens as “reasonably anticipated” to be a human carcinogen.Brominated Vegetable Oil (BVO)
BVO is used in some citrus-flavored soft drinks like Mountain Dew and in some sports drinks to prevent separation of ingredients, but it is banned in Europe. It contains bromine, the element found in brominated flame retardants, and studies suggest it can build up in the body and can potentially lead to memory loss and skin and nerve problems. An F.D.A. spokeswoman said it is safe in limited amounts, and that the agency would take action “should new safety studies become available that raise questions about the safety of BVO.”Yellow food dyes No. 5 and No. 6, and Red Dye No. 40
These dyes can be used in foods sold in Europe, but the products must carry a warning saying the coloring agents “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.” No such warning is required in the United States, though the Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the F.D.A. in 2008 to ban the dyes. Consumers can try to avoid the dyes by reading lists of ingredients on labels, “but they’re used in so many things you wouldn’t even think of, not just candy and icing and cereal, but things like mustard and ketchup,” marshmallows, chocolate, and breakfast bars that appear to contain fruit, Ms. Lefferts, the food safety scientist, said.
The F.D.A.’s website says reactions to food coloring are rare, but acknowledges that yellow dye No. 5, used widely in drinks, desserts, processed vegetables and drugs, may cause itching and hives.Farm Animal Drugs
The European Union also bans some drugs that are used on farm animals in the United States, citing health concerns. These drugs include bovine growth hormone, which the United States dairy industry uses to increase milk production. The European Union also does not allow the drug ractopamine, used in the United States to increase weight gain in pigs, cattle and turkeys before slaughter, saying that “risks to human health cannot be ruled out.” An F.D.A. spokeswoman said the drugs are safe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/well/eat/food-additives-banned-europe-united-states.html
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When Hospitals Pour Drugs Down the Drain
Dec 28, 2018 | CNN
By Susan Scutti
Patricia Deesy, a registered nurse, is worried about the drinking water in her home state of North Carolina."When I started out in nursing almost 30 years ago, policy at hospitals was to waste partial doses of narcotics in the sharps containers," Deesy said. "These containers would then be incinerated by a company that picked them up when they became full."Yet this incineration caused air pollution, Deesy said, so over time, hospitals shifted to "dumping the containers into landfills.""People would actually break into the containers and steal the wasted meds and syringes and use them," said Deesy, who lives near Charlotte. As a contract nurse, she has worked "for just about every hospital within two hours of my home."Today, the policy "in every facility that I am aware of" is to "waste" unused medicines down the sink or toilet.Mussels in Washington's Puget Sound test positive for opioids, other drugs"If someone is ordered morphine 1 milligram every four hours and it comes supplied in 2-milligram vials, then I have to waste 1 milligram down the sink each time," she explained. "It's ridiculous." Imagine all the nurses on all the shifts in all the hospitals across the country doing the same, she said."Every time I waste something, I think I'm destroying my water system," she said. "I've got kids and grandkids. I hate to see us polluting their water like that."'Conflicting rules'A 2017 study titled "Drugs down the drain: When nurses object" begins with an observation: "Many times during a typical workday, American hospital nurses routinely discard unused portions of narcotics and other controlled substances into municipal water supplies." The reason this practice is routine, the authors suggest, stems from inconsistencies in regulations and how they are interpreted by hospitals."There are agencies at the federal, state, and local levels that have issued conflicting rules" about pharmaceutical disposal methods for hospitals, the authors wrote.The Environmental Protection Agency strongly discourages pouring or flushing pharmaceuticals down the drain in any setting, including at health care facilities, because they may enter and pass through water treatment systems and contaminate the water supply. As part of its rule for managing hazardous waste pharmaceuticals, the EPA has banned the "sewering" (or pouring down the drain or toilet) of hazardous waste pharmaceuticals at health care facilities.However, this rule, which was only finalized this month, applies only to drugs considered hazardous waste, such as toxic chemotherapy drugs. Most pharmaceuticals do not fall into this category.In contrast to the EPA's stance, the US Food and Drug Administration has advised individuals to sewer narcotics and controlled substances, including morphine and other opioids, in order to avoid harm to animals and humans, including children, who could gain access to these powerful and dangerous drugs.Study: Public water supply is unsafe for millions of Americans"To date, scientists have found no evidence of harmful effects to human health from medicines in the environment," the FDA website says.The FDA does not provide official guidance to hospitals. Still, the recommendation of this federal agency might carry weight with hospital administrators, who must also consider and follow the requirements of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the DEA, explained that diversion is his agency's primary concern when it comes to how hospitals handle pharmaceutical drugs."Many problems associated with drug abuse are the result of legitimately made controlled substances being diverted from their lawful purpose into illicit drug traffic," the DEA websitesays. In plain English, doctors, nurses or other hospital staff sometimes steal pharmaceuticals labeled controlled substances by the DEA -- opioids, mostly -- in order to sell them for profit or use themselves."We document the sales, what comes in and out, in terms of controlled substances, not all drugs, just controlled substances," Payne said. For example, the DEA demands that painkillers such as morphine and other opioids be "heavily documented in terms of how they're distributed and administered in a hospital."For this reason, hospitals and hospital pharmacies have strict regulations that require nurses to document each use of a controlled substance, according to Payne. He's been told that "it's fairly common" for hospitals to waste liquid medicines down the sink.General regulations"There aren't too many contaminants that would build up in drinking water," said George Cushnie, technical director for the EPA-sponsored Healthcare Resource Center, which provides pollution prevention and environmental information to health care organizations.Because most drinking water comes from rivers or reservoirs, "you're constantly using water, and there's new water coming in, so there's really not an opportunity for it to build up."Mike Focazio, program coordinator of the Geological Survey's Toxic Substances Hydrology Program, said his agency has not done testing of waste specifically coming out of hospitals, but it has done "wastewater studies that come out of what we call sewer sheds -- in other words, a city or a town that does include hospitals.""We have sampled that water for many years," he said. "We have found that we can detect a variety of pharmaceutical residues at very low levels in quite a lot of different waste streams across the country."'Complicated' mixture of drugsPharmaceutical water contamination is common knowledge. A 2011 Government Accountability Office report on environmental health reads, "pharmaceuticals may enter the environment and ultimately drinking water supplies in various ways, such as through the elimination of human and animal waste, disposal of unused medicines down the toilet or drain, veterinary drug usage, hospital waste disposal, and industrial discharges."What is unknown, Focazio said, is how much of that is due to hospitals versus people in their homes discarding unused medicines or simply metabolizing medicines, which we excrete in urine and feces that flows into our toilets.Cushnie said his "gut feeling is, most likely, households are discharging a lot more of their unused meds into the sewer system than hospitals." He believes that a larger number of people are using and disposing medications at home compared with the number of patients lying in hospital beds.Tech start-up lets you transfer your unused medicineWhether pharmaceutical residues in water samples come from hospital or home use, Focazio said, the concentration levels are much higher in some places than in others."If you look at the concentrations that we detect -- even at those high concentrations -- and you compare it to the dose that somebody would take -- even in, again, those places with very high levels or higher than elsewhere -- you'd have to drink enormous amounts of water just to get back to that prescribed dose," Focazio said."But the question is: What does it mean from a health standpoint when these low levels get out into the environment?" he said. The human health effects are unknown. And it's not just one drug, say, one particular antidepressant. It's many brands and types of antidepressants plus an assortment of antihistamines and anti-inflammatories and all sorts of other pharmaceuticals mixed together."It gets very complicated very fast," Focazio said.Medicine or poison?Increasingly, environmental scientists are wondering whether the very substances that are meant to cure us -- medicines -- might also pose a threat to our health when found in drinking water. As a result, pharmaceuticals have been listed as "contaminants of emerging concern" by the EPA.Your drain on drugs: Amphetamines seep into Baltimore's streamsIn some cases, contaminants of emerging concern have probably been discharged into the environment for a long time before new and more sensitive detection methods could identify them, notes a GAO report. Harms to aquatic life have been documented by a number of studies, yet possible negative effects for human health are inconclusive. The EPA has begun the process of revising its existing guidelines for the protection of aquatic life.Other public health agencies, including the UN's World Health Organization, express similar concerns and findings as the EPA. "There is a substantial margin of safety between the very low concentrations of pharmaceuticals that would be consumed in drinking-water and the minimum therapeutic doses, which suggests a very low risk to human health," a recent WHO report finds.'A whole soup of drugs'Dr. David J.C. Constable, science director of the American Chemical Society's Green Chemistry Institute, explained the rationale behind the WHO report, though he was not involved in it or in decisions made at the EPA."When you take a drug, it is given at a dose which causes a desired therapeutic effect. However, it will cause some physiological response at a lower dose," Constable wrote in an email. "This difference in response vs effect gives a significant margin of safety for most drugs." This is why WHO says concentrations well below therapeutic effect are very low risk to human health, he said.Mae Wu, a senior attorney in the health program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, said one of its big questions and concerns is that the EPA and other groups, when examining the safety of pharmaceuticals in drinking water, may be basing their assessment on the "therapeutic" levels approved by the FDA.Don't dump old pills; here's how to dispose of them safely"But the reality is, once it gets into our drinking water, we are not talking about any one drug, right? We're talking about a whole soup of drugs, and for every location, it's a different mixture," she said.Though toxicologists test chemicals in combinations, they do not test each and every unique combination of mixed drugs and other chemicals found in the sewers of individual cities in the United States.Wu also said that most FDA-approved drugs have been tested only in adults. Young babies and children do not participate in clinical trials that test adult medications for safety and effectiveness, she said, yet babies and children "are often more vulnerable and more sensitive to these types of things.""We definitely don't know what's happening there," she said.Constable believes that "the question of mixtures is what has people in the EPA most concerned." The assumption is that the cocktail of chemicals in drinking water, food and air "can't be good for you," he wrote. "There is a fear of synergistic effects; that is, 1+1 > 2, or that the presence of one compound decreases the body's ability to metabolize another."'Multigenerational impacts'?There are additional concerns that low-concentration exposures to chemicals, including pharmaceuticals, are leading to "multigenerational impacts" that we have not been able to discern, he said."The problem for everyone is that we just don't really have a good handle on this. No one does, and the debate is that the precautionary principle should be applied," Constable wrote in an email. That principle amounts to "if we don't know, there is no acceptable level," he said, and once that point is reached, science begins to devolve into "a discussion of policy."Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.Since the late '90s, when scientists learned of a variety of contaminants, including pharmaceuticals, in the nation's waterways, "there was a lot of activity by the government and the Pharma industry to systematically assess the extent of pharmaceuticals in the environment," Constable wrote. A great deal of work has been going into this "over many years," he said.Focazio said the US Geological Survey has started looking more recently not just at what can be detected but at "what does it mean from a health standpoint.""The human health aspect of this is a little bit out of our wheelhouse, so we are working with other public health agencies to give them the data so at least they know what the levels are," he said. The Geological Survey has begun studies on fish and aquatic biota to see how these other life forms are affected.Awaiting more extensive research into human health effects, simple solutions at the hospital level may be available."There is a company that has a safe box that comes with a neutralizing solution in it that can be used for wasting narcotics, but I have yet to see anyone use it," Deesy said, adding that she's asked several hospitals "to investigate using them with no response."Awareness among hospital staff is also key, she said, and though she tried repeatedly to raise the awareness of health care administrators through local media, she once again hit a brick wall of "no response.""We don't need to be destroying our water," Deesy said. "We should be taking care of our water."
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/28/health/water-pharmaceutical-contaminants-epa/
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US Fossil Fuel Exports Spur Growth, Climate Worries
Dec 28, 2018 | AP (In The New York Times, The Washington Post)
By Michael Biesecker
In South Korea's largest shipyard, thousands of workers in yellow hard hats move ceaselessly between towering cranes lifting hulks of steel. They look like a hive of bees scurrying over a massive circuit board as they weld together the latest additions to the rapidly growing fleet of tankers carrying super-chilled liquefied natural gas across the world's oceans.
The boom in fossil-fuel production in the United States has been matched by a rush on the other side of the Pacific to build the infrastructure needed to respond to the seemingly unquenchable thirst for energy among Asia's top economies. When Congress lifted restrictions on shipping crude oil overseas in 2015, soon after the Obama administration opened the doors for international sales of natural gas, even the most boosterish of Texas oil men wouldn't have predicted the U.S. could become one of the world's biggest fossil-fuel exporters so quickly.
Climate experts say there is little doubt increased American production and exports are contributing to the recent rise in planet-warming carbon emissions by helping keep crude prices low, increasing consumption in developing economies.
Backers of U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, argue that the boom will produce environmental benefits because it will help China and other industrial nations wean themselves from coal and other dirtier fossil fuels.
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Environmentalists counter that the massive new supplies unleashed by American advances in extracting natural gas from shale doesn't just make coal-fired power plants less competitive. LNG also competes with such zero-carbon sources of electricity as nuclear, solar and wind — potentially delaying the full adoption of greener sources. That's time climate scientists and researchers say the world doesn't have if humans hope to mitigate the worst-case consequences of our carbon emissions, including catastrophic sea-level rise, stronger storms and more wildfires.
"Typically, infrastructure has multi-decadal lifespans," said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. "So, if we build a natural-gas plant today, that will impact carbon emissions over decades to come. So those are the critical and crucial decisions that are being made today. Do we increase access to and use of fossil fuels, or do we make decisions that limit and eventually reduce access to fossil fuels?"
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This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity, The Texas Tribune and Newsy.
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While it is difficult to estimate how much America's rise as major exporter of fossil fuels is contributing to a hotter climate, some of the economic benefits are plain to see in South Korea's shipyards.
At the sprawling Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering facility on the island of Geoje, more than half of the 35 vessels scheduled for delivery in 2018 were LNG carriers. A similar number of vessels are lined up for completion next year.Editors’ PicksSigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn’t.Menial Tasks, Slurs and Swastikas: Many Black Workers at Tesla Say They Faced RacismHow China Walled Off the Internet
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It's the same story at the two other major Korean yards. The construction of the big gas tankers has been credited with lifting the nation's shipbuilding sector out of the doldrums from a decade ago, when the Great Recession caused a downturn in transoceanic trade.
South Korea's big three shipbuilders — Daewoo, Hyundai Heavy Industries and Samsung Heavy Industries — won orders for 53 new LNG carriers in 2018 at about $200 million each, soaking up the lion's share of the 62 vessels ordered globally, according to numbers compiled by the London-based shipping group Clarkson Research. South Korea is expected to finish 2018 at the top spot in overall orders for new commercial ships, surpassing China for the first time in seven years.
"We are getting out of a long tunnel," Song Ha-dong, a senior Daewoo executive, said as he surveyed the company's 1,200-acre yard from above the British Contributor, a gargantuan LNG carrier with a freshly painted deck covered in a maze of pipes. "The U.S.-led shale gas boom is getting fully under way and China, Japan and South Korea are increasing their consumption of natural gas."
During a recent visit by The Associated Press, three of the LNG carriers were being assembled inside a massive dry dock. Another 13, including the British Contributor, had been floated out to nearby berths where workers were putting on finishing touches.
The Korean shipyards have developed a niche in building ships with the complex systems needed to transport natural gas. The gas is compressed and liquefied for storage by keeping it really cold, about -260 Fahrenheit. In this liquid state, natural gas is about 600 times smaller than at room temperature.
The British Contributor is as long as three football fields and can carry enough liquefied gas to fill about 70 Olympic-sized swimming pools — nearly two days' national supply for South Korea. The country used about 1.9 trillion cubic feet of LNG in 2017, finishing third behind China and Japan as the world's biggest importers, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
With no domestic oil and gas resources and an unfriendly neighbor blocking overland shipments from the north, South Korea relies exclusively on oceangoing tankers. Nearly half of South Korea's gas imports come from Qatar and Australia, but the share shipped from the U.S. is growing fast as additional export terminals along the Gulf coast are coming online to handle the glut of gas unleashed by hydraulic fracturing in the Permian Basin of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico.Sign up for The Interpreter
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U.S. LNG exports quadrupled in 2017, with this year on track to see similarly exponential growth. Nearly a fifth of all that gas goes to South Korea.
The British Contributor is the third of six LNG carriers being built by Daewoo for British energy giant BP, which will mainly use them to transport U.S. gas to Asia under a 20-year contract with the Freeport LNG facility south of Houston. Daewoo delivered four similar ships this year to the government-owned Korea Gas Corporation, which has a 20-year deal to buy gas exported from Cheniere Energy's Sabine Pass LNG terminal in Louisiana.
South Korea has been vying with Mexico for the title of the largest importer of U.S. LNG, and its reliance on gas could further increase under the government of President Moon Jae-in, who has pledged to transition his country away from nuclear power following the Fukushima meltdown in Japan.
Park Moo-hyun, a senior analyst at Hana Financial Investment, predicts shipping companies will need to place orders for around 480 new LNG carriers over the next decade to match the U.S.-driven increase in global LNG trade — roughly doubling the current worldwide fleet.
"The impact brought by the emergence of shale is not just about an increase in U.S. energy exports — there has been tremendous growth in the production of energy sources that hadn't been used much, such as LNG," Park said. "Once the groundwork is established for the stable use of these new energy sources, industries are pushed to adapt."
Natural gas has the added appeal of producing about half the carbon dioxide when it's burned than coal. Its increased adoption for generating electricity has been pitched by the U.S. and others as a way for nations to make progress toward meeting their emissions reductions goals under the 2015 Paris climate accord. Burning gas also creates less particulate pollution.
In China, the Communist government has declared a "Blue Sky Defense War" to reduce the choking smog in Beijing and two dozen surrounding cities with a program to convert hundreds of thousands of homes and industrial facilities from burning coal to gas. In February, Texas-based Cheniere signed a 25-year deal with the state-controlled China National Petroleum Corporation to export LNG from its export terminal in Corpus Christi.
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But the increased gas exports from the U.S. and other sources hasn't really put much of dent in Chinese coal consumption, which has remained largely flat in 2018. Overall carbon emissions for China, the globe's biggest emitter, saw a nearly five percent increase in 2018.
Daniel Raimi, a researcher at the Washington-based think tank Resources for the Future, said determining whether U.S. gas exports are a net good or bad for the climate is difficult. When considering China, researchers can't just look at whether coal use or carbon emissions are falling. They must also try to calculate how much more coal would have been burned had ample supplies of gas not been available.
Another challenge is that the primary component of natural gas is methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps far more heat in the atmosphere than a comparable amount of carbon dioxide. Studies have shown that a significant amount of natural gas leaks into the air at almost every stage of its production and transport — from wells to pipelines, processing facilities to ships. Raimi said the impact of all that leaking methane on the climate is roughly 84 times more powerful than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame.
As part of its broad rollback of environmental rules, the Trump administration moved in September to weaken Obama-era regulations designed to prevent methane from escaping into the atmosphere during oil and gas operations. The regulatory rollbacks are part of President Donald Trump's pro-industry "Energy Dominance" strategy to ramp up U.S. fossil-fuel production without concern for the corresponding increase in greenhouse-gas emissions. Trump has falsely claimed climate change is a "hoax," and moved in 2017 to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris accord.
"With or without increased U.S. oil and gas exports, ambitious policy measures are the essential ingredient to achieving long-term climate goals such as those laid out in the 2015 Paris agreement," Raimi said. "For U.S. LNG exports to reduce global emissions, they must primarily displace coal, and methane emissions must be limited both domestically and abroad."
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/12/27/world/asia/ap-us-blowout-climate-export-boom-.html
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Kinder Morgan Gas Pipeline Survives Legal Scrutiny (1)
Dec 27, 2018 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Jenniffer Bennett and David Schultz
A Kinder Morgan Inc. gas pipeline in northeastern Pennsylvania appears to be free of legal jeopardy after an environmental group lost its bid in court to block it.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against the Delaware Riverkeeper Network in its bid to overturn Kinder Morgan’s federal permit to construct the 13-mile long Orion Project pipeline. Maya K. van Rossum, the group’s leader, said it probably wouldn’t continue with the case.
“I don’t think that this is the hill that we’re going to die on,” she told Bloomberg Environment. “We have many legal actions that we’re pursuing. I think the way this played out, this is probably going to be the end of the line for this battle.”
Hidden AlternativeVan Rossum’s group was arguing that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission erred in granting Kinder Morgan a permit to build the Orion pipeline.
The activist group said FERC secretly rejected an alternative version of the project that would have been more environmentally friendly. The group learned of the alternative when it obtained a trove of FERC documents in a separate, unrelated lawsuit.
The three appeals court judges who heard the case—Merrick B. Garland, Gregory G. Katsas, and Stephen F. Williams—disagreed. They said in an unpublished Dec. 27 ruling that there’s no requirement for FERC to publish internal drafts or explain why they differ from final decisions.
Though Delaware Riverkeeper Network likely won’t continue its legal fight against the Orion Project, van Rossum said it will use this case as ammunition to prod the newly Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to hold hearings into FERC’s oversight of pipeline projects.
The case is Del. Riverkeeper Network v. FERC, D.C. Cir., No. 18-1108, unpublished 12/27/18.
(Updated to add comment from Delaware Riverkeeper Network.)
https://bnanews.bna.com/environment-and-energy/kinder-morgan-gas-pipeline-survives-legal-scrutiny-1
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Report: US Miscalculated Benefit of Better Train Brakes
Dec 27, 2018 | AP (In Transport Topics Online)
By Matthew Brown
President Donald Trump’s administration miscalculated the potential benefits of putting better brakes on trains that haul explosive fuels when it scrapped an Obama-era rule over cost concerns, The Associated Press has found.
A government analysis used to justify the cancellation omitted up to $117 million in estimated future damages from train derailments that could be avoided by using electronic brakes. Revelation of the error stoked renewed criticism Dec. 20 from the rule’s supporters, who called the analysis biased.In making their cost-benefit calculations, government economists left out the most common type of derailments in which spilled and burning fuel causes property damage but no mass casualties, the AP found. Equipping fuel trains with electronic brakes would reduce damages from those derailments by an estimated $48 million to $117 million.
Department of Transportation officials acknowledged the mistake after it was discovered by the AP during a review of federal documents. They said a correction will be published to the Federal Register.
But transportation spokesman Bobby Fraser said the decision not to require the brakes would stand under a congressional act that said the costs couldn’t exceed the rule’s benefits.
In this Nov. 8, 2013 file photo, a tanker train carrying crude oil burns after derailing outside Aliceville, Ala. (Bill Castle/ABC 33/40 via AP, File)
“This was an unintentional error,” Fraser. “With the correction, in all scenarios costs still outweigh benefits.”
Safety advocates, transportation union leaders and Democratic lawmakers oppose the administration’s decision to kill the brake rule, which was included in a package of rail safety measures enacted in 2015 under President Barack Obama following dozens of accidents by trains hauling oil and ethanol in the U.S. and Canada.
The deadliest happened in Canada in 2013, when an unattended train carrying crude oil rolled down an incline, came off the tracks in the town of Lac-Megantic and exploded into a massive ball of fire, killing 47 people and obliterating much of the Quebec community’s downtown.
There have been other fiery crashes and fuel spills in Alabama, Oregon, Montana, Virginia, West Virginia, North Dakota, Illinois and elsewhere.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said the administration should reconsider the brake rule in light of its miscalculation.
“The omission of $117 million from the rule’s anticipated benefits is further proof that the Trump administration is willing to cut corners to put industry profits ahead of the American people’s safety,” said Merkley. He called for “a new cost-benefit analysis that is full and transparent.”
After the brake rule was enacted, lobbyists for the railroad and oil industries pushed to cancel it, citing the high cost of installing so-called electronic pneumatic brakes and questioning their effectiveness.
But supporters of the brakes said the issue should be reconsidered given the miscalculation and concerns about other benefits that may have been ignored, including reducing the frequency of runaway trains and severity of train-on-train collisions, said Robert Duff, a senior adviser to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat.
A warning placard on a tank car carrying crude oil near a loading terminal in Trenton, N.D. (Matthew Brown/AP)
“This is not theoretical risk. We’ve actually seen these derailments,” Duff said.
Unlike other systems where brakes are applied sequentially along the length of a train, electronic pneumatic brakes, or ECP, work on all cars simultaneously. That can reduce the distance and time a train needs to stop and cause fewer cars to derail.
“These ECP brakes are very important for oil trains,” said Steven Ditmeyer, a rail safety expert and former senior official at the Federal Railroad Administration. “It makes a great deal of sense: All the brakes get applied immediately, and there would be fewer cars in the pileup.”
Under Obama, the Transportation Department determined the brakes would cost up to $664 million over 20 years and save between $470 million and $1.1 billion from accidents that would be avoided.
The Trump administration reduced the range of benefits to between $131 million and $374 million.
In this June 6, 2016, file aerial video image taken from a drone, crumpled oil tankers lie beside the railroad tracks after a fiery train derailment that prompted evacuations from the tiny Columbia River Gorge town of Mosier, Ore. (Brent Foster via AP)
Transportation Department economists said in their analysis that the change was prompted in part by a reduction in oil train traffic in recent years. Even as ethanol shipments on U.S. railroads have continued to grow, reaching about 500,000 carloads annually, crude shipments peaked in 2014 and fell to about 200,000 carloads last year.
But in making their cost-benefit calculations, government economists left out the most common type of derailments in which spilled and burning fuel causes property damage but no mass casualties, the AP found. Equipping fuel trains with electronic brakes would reduce damages from those derailments by an estimated $48 million to $117 million, according to Department of Transportation estimates that were left out of the administration’s final tally.
Including the omitted benefits reduces the net cost of the requirement to as low as $63 million under one scenario laid out by the agency. Other scenarios put the net cost at more than $200 million.
Transportation spokesman Fraser said that would not have changed September’s decision to cancel the electronic brake requirement because of the cost.
The Association of American Railroads declined comment on the agency’s cost-benefit calculations. Spokeswoman Jessica Kahanek said the move to rescind the Obama rule was in line with the requirements set forth by Congress, which passed a 2015 measure saying the Department of Transportation must repeal the braking requirement if expected costs exceed benefits
https://www.ttnews.com/articles/report-us-miscalculated-benefit-better-train-brakes
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Metro-North Initiates Safety Enhancement System on Mid-Hudson Line
Dec 28, 2018 | River Journal
By Alain Begun
Metro-North Railroad has begun commissioning a new safety system, Positive Train Control (PTC) on the segment of the Hudson Line between Tarrytown and Croton-Harmon. The eight-mile stretch of tracks, became the first segment of the MTA’s commuter railroads to begin limited passenger service testing on Wednesday, Nov. 21.
Positive Train Control enhances train safety behind the scenes by eliminating the potential for human error to contribute to train-to-train collisions or derailments caused by a train traveling too fast into a curve or into a misaligned switch. It also prevents trains from traveling into zones where railroad employees are working on tracks, a potentially grave situation that since 2014 has been eliminated on Metro-North through the establishment of the railroad’s Enhanced Employee Protection System, which gives to track workers in the field the ability to confirm which tracks are taken out of service for maintenance and prevents entry of trains.
Positive Train Control uses a network of computers on board trains and alongside the tracks that are in communication with a central control hub, sharing data on rail conditions in real time. Like roads, every stretch of track has a speed limit; lights at the railroad’s equivalent of intersections flash red and green to indicate when a train must stop or can proceed. If the Positive Train Control system detects that a train is operating too fast for a given stretch of track, or is at risk of passing a stop signal, the system automatically steps in to slow or stop the train, while alerting the train’s engineer that it is doing so.
PTC builds upon existing Metro-North systems such as in-cab signaling with Automatic Train Control, systemwide automatic civil speed enforcement and the Enhanced Employee Protection System, which already offer some of the most substantial functions of PTC.
“Safety is a core value of Metro-North and we are very pleased to build on our existing safety measures as we roll out this important new system,” said Metro-North Railroad President Catherine Rinaldi. “We overcame numerous challenging obstacles to reach this milestone. We will continue to work unceasingly to ensure this roll-out takes place as quickly as possible, and we will continue to aggressively look for new and better ways to improve safety throughout the railroad.”
MTA Chief Safety Officer Patrick Warren said, “While no single technology can eliminate all risk, the introduction of PTC dramatically reduces the risk of train accidents. The MTA remains steadfast in its drive to sustain and improve safety measures in all aspects of the operation of its railroads.”
Metro-North Railroad and the Long Island Rail Road are adhering to an aggressive segment-by-segment implementation schedule that puts them on paths to complete the roll-out of PTC across their entire networks before the Federal deadline of December 31, 2020.
For a video explaining how Positive Train Control works, click on this 3-minute video at this LINK.
https://riverjournalonline.com/business/metro-north-initiates-safety-enhancement-system-on-mid-hudson-line/13532/
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‘Green New Deal’ Divides Democrats Intent on Addressing Climate Change
Dec 27, 2018 | The Washington Post
By Elise Viebeck and David Weigel
One week after House Democrats triumphed in the election, Rep. Nancy Pelosi extended her hand to the party’s energized left wing by promising to revive the select committee on climate change.
The move thrilled activists who, joined by incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had protested in Pelosi’s office that day. And word of reconstituting the panel, which was revered among Democrats for helping produce the 2009 cap-and-trade bill, was greeted as a sign of the party’s commitment to aggressive climate action in the next Congress.
But the committee will not have authority to approve legislation and is not expected to have subpoena power — unlike its 2007 version. The committee’s influence will be limited by Republican control of the Senate and President Trump’s rejection of climate science. While Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has called on the committee to draft a ‘Green New Deal’ to get the country off fossil fuels by 2030, its work may not carry weight with the powerful standing committees in the House.
The coming battle will test liberals’ clout, as tensions between the activist left and the Democratic establishment underscore the ideological and strategic rifts that will affect the party ahead of the 2020 presidential primary.
“We should have a robust debate of ideas . . . then we figure out how to come to a consensus so that we are effective and are able in 2020 to defeat Donald Trump,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). “The worst thing we could do is stifle a very vigorous debate because of a deference to protocol or precedent.”
Congressional Democrats are united on the need to combat man-made climate change, but there is debate over what solutions to pursue and how aggressively in the era of divided government.
Pelosi, poised to become the next House Speaker, and other party leaders have talked about addressing climate change as part of an infrastructure reform package that could earn backing from Trump; liberals want nothing less than the Green New Deal, a restructuring of the economy often compared to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.
Support for the Green New Deal is showing signs of becoming a liberal litmus test among Democrats who may run for president. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) recently endorsed it, joining Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Rising support for this approach could shape the work of the House’s climate panel. Nearly 40 House Democrats agree that the committee should focus its efforts on making the Green New Deal a reality. A proposal from Ocasio-Cortez and the youth-driven Sunrise Movement sets a March 2020 deadline for the panel to come up with legislation.
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), a longtime ally of environmentalists, told E&E News last week that Pelosi (Calif.) asked her to consider leading the select panel but that the news was not “official quite yet.”
Castor is not a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. On advocates for the Green New Deal, she told E&E News: “I think they have some terrific ideas . . . but that’s not going to be our sole focus.”
Climate activists expressed disappointment.
“Without a mandate to create a plan and a requirement that its members don’t take fossil fuel money, we are deeply concerned that this committee will be just another of the many committees we’ve seen failing our generation our entire lives,” said Varshini Prakash, the Sunrise Movement’s spokeswoman.
Incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has called on the climate change committee to draft a ‘Green New Deal’ to get the country off fossil fuels by 2030. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)The push reflects the increasing power and visibility of liberals on Capitol Hill. Poised to be the largest of the values-based caucuses next year, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has already received a jolt of energy from members such as Ocasio-Cortez, whose political celebrity and regular posts to her 1.1 million Instagram followers have earned her clout and attention unheard of for an incoming member of Congress.
A number of lawmakers, including Khanna and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who co-chairs the caucus, have said they encouraged Ocasio-Cortez to seek a leadership position on the select panel.
Major overhaul bills are typically the work of standing committees, which are a mainstay of the legislative process and have the knowledge and strategic expertise that new panels sometimes lack. Climate activists have said they have been dealt a setback on that front, after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who is a strong proponent of the coal industry, won the party’s top spot on the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Unlike other soon-to-be standing committee chairmen, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said he “didn’t have a great deal of angst” about the climate panel.
“It’s another platform to really talk about climate change and really enter it back into the dialogue for this country,” said Grijalva, who will lead the House Natural Resources Committee in January. He said he expects the standing committees that work on environmental issues to coordinate their efforts. He said he hopes that at least one member of his panel will also serve in the climate group as a “linkage.”
The committees have still moved to defend their turf on climate issues.
After Pelosi said she would resurrect the select panel, Grijalva joined incoming chairmen on the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee to announce they will hold two days of climate hearings in early 2019.
Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), who will lead Energy and Commerce in January, has also announced plans to investigate the Trump administration’s sweeping rollback of environmental regulations.
Asked about the climate panel, Pallone has pushed back on the notion that the standing committees would take a more deferential approach.
“I don’t want to prejudge what we are going to do other than to say that we intend to be very aggressive about it and the progressives will be very happy,” he said last month on Capitol Hill.
But the New Jersey Democrat has not backed the Green New Deal.
“The goal of trying to reduce fossil fuels and get to a carbon neutral economy is important and something that I agree with. The question is how long it takes to do that,” he said recently, according to the Asbury Park Press. “The Green New Deal says you can do it in 10 years. I don’t know if that’s technologically feasible . . . Beyond that, it’s probably not politically feasible.”
Critics of standing committees argue that they can be easily distracted from ambitious work and may be more susceptible to influence from lobbyists.
Howie Klein, the founder of Blue America PAC — one of few PACs that donated to Ocasio-Cortez before her primary win — warned that Democrats who run the committees know how to silo off the left.
“I believe that Pelosi wants to do this — I really do,” Klein said of aggressive climate action. “But most of these guys want the gigs to raise money.”
Supporters of the Green New Deal rally outside the office of House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.). (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)The back-and-forth recalls 2007, when Pelosi created the original climate panel and appointed now-Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) as chairman. With Democrats in control of the House and Senate, that panel had clout from the beginning, working to lay the foundation for legislation that could pass both chambers within two years.
Suspicious leaders of the standing committees worked to limit its legislative powers.
“We should probably name it the committee on world travel and junkets,” then-Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), who was chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said in 2007. “We’re just empowering a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs to go around and make speeches and make commitments that will be very difficult to honor.”
The panel contributed work to major legislation, including the cap-and-trade bill, which mandated an 83 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The measure was approved by the House but never passed the Senate.
The latest climate science points to the high stakes facing today’s lawmakers.
In October, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that “unprecedented” international efforts to cut carbon emissions are required in the next dozen years to keep climate change to moderate levels.
The Trump administration has taken the opposite approach, cutting regulation even while forecasting a disastrous 7-degree rise in global temperatures by the end of this century. Trump administration officials have promoted fossil fuels on the international stage while Trump himself has expressed doubts that human activity has contributed to warming temperatures.
“A lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump said in November. “As to whether it’s man-made and whether the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it.”
The limitations of the select committee are already coming into focus, including its expected lack of subpoena power.
Prakash called this an “insult to the thousands of young people across the country who have been calling on the Democratic Party leadership to have the courage to stand up to fossil fuel billionaires.”
“The Democratic Party establishment never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” she said.
But Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who served on the original committee, said it was a worthy project despite its lack of legislative authority.
“It engaged the passions and creativity of legislators, some of who might be on the standing committees,” Inslee said. “It gave us room to try out creative ideas. I think it sharpened our pencils; it was additive, not duplicative.”
Jayapal said she worked alongside fellow caucus co-chairman Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) to convince activists not to demand that the standing committees yield legislative power on climate change.
“We’re finally in a position where progressives have committee chairs,” she said. “We don’t want to take away that ability to pass legislation.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/green-new-deal-divides-democrats-intent-on-addressing-climate-change/2018/12/27/c3b6a144-02d5-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html?utm_term=.091df165c41f
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